


It's peace I desire but I can't put the fire out

by sovery



Series: Titles by Dry the River [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Female Harry, Female Harry Potter, Gen, Hogwarts Sixth Year, being a servant to a meglomaniac kind of sucks, not particularly shippy nor happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 15:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10946931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovery/pseuds/sovery
Summary: As if Draco didn't have enough to deal with there was this; Violet Potter had become beautiful.





	It's peace I desire but I can't put the fire out

As if he didn’t have enough on his plate – far, far too fucking much, and he’s hardly able to sleep without waking up in a cold sweat anymore, and he knows he’s looking terrible, and Nott and Zabini hardly pay him any mind anymore, and Pansy’s been whining about how inattentive he’s been to everything lately, actually expressing concern for him that didn’t seem self-serving which just goes to show how pathetic he must be looking – as if there wasn’t all of that to be dealing with, there was this; Potter had suddenly gotten _incredibly_ fit.

He distinctly remembered her as a raggedly little girl with awful hair, and those glasses, so little and scrawny that she could have easily passed as a boy, but somehow between then and now, she had become one of the prettiest girls in school. And of course, being the Chosen One, as they were calling her now, everyone was talking about her, which only made things worse. He couldn’t get a moment’s peace. From her. From everything else.

They had always been rivals of a sort and he could admit to have been jealous of her – of all the attention she so effortlessly captured – and of her spot on the Quidditch team, handed to her as a first-year while he had to wait until his second year, like everyone else. But though he’d always taunted her, and hated her in what he now recognizes as a childish sort of way, he hadn’t ever been so aware of everything that she was doing, of everything that anyone was saying about her. And everyone was always talking about her these days, precious, perfect Violet Potter and how talented, how beautiful, how good she was.

And he really needed to be focused on killing Dumbledore. More and more, he recognized that he had been set up to fail. That the Dark Lord cared little to nothing for his family, and that all the power he had once thought his father had enjoyed meant nothing compared to the terrible wizard who had effectively commandeered his family’s manor, and who, along with his mad Aunt Bellatrix, was effectively keeping his mother prisoner.

Merlin and Morgana, what would she think of him if she could see him now? He pictured his mother’s cool and beautiful face, the rare expressions of warmth and pride that she seemed to reserve only for him, the quiet but meaningful praise she had offered him for his successes, even when he had sulked that they never seemed to measure up to the achievements of Potter’s mudblood, Granger, or Potter herself, winning the House Cup again and again in spite of everything.

What would she think of him if she knew that even as her husband was imprisoned in Azkaban, and she in her own Manor, her son, who had been entrusted with a vital mission, was wasting time obsessing about The Girl Who Lived?

*

He glared at her from behind his table, where she sat with Weasley and Granger, blushing prettily under Professor Slughorn’s effusive praise. It was disgusting how the man fawned over her.

“Just like your mother,” the man was saying, beaming at her, “she was a dab hand at Potions, Lily was!”

She muttered something demure, always coy in the face of praise, always acting as though she didn’t want the attention. And fuck, maybe she didn’t. He was beginning to realize more and more what an idiot he had been in previous years – the things he had made a priority. He’d trade his spot on the Quidditch team, his badge, the prestige and the authority he’d always wanted in a heartbeat if it would get his father out of Azkaban. If it would keep his mother safe. If it meant they could be a family again.

What would things have been like, this year, he thought, as he made his way from the dungeons, if the Dark Lord hadn’t returned? He allowed himself for imagine it for a moment. His father would be free, of course, and his mother happy. He would have been invited to join Professor Slughorn’s gatherings, of course, as befit a Malfoy, and he might even have been seated across from Potter. She might even have looked at him with something other than the suspicion that was never very far from her eyes these days – beautiful eyes, strikingly green and large.

He entertained the thought for a moment, picturing her laughing at something clever he had said, wearing dress robes like those she had appeared at the Yule Ball in, leaning in and looking at him with admiration, tossing her dark hair and smiling at him. Her pink mouth curving, her elegant slim figure pressing against his. Her confession of how she had always admired him, really, drawing her closer as Weasley and Longbottom and all of her other little male admirers looked on helplessly.

 _Stupid_ , he reminded himself. She’d probably never look at him with anything but dislike no matter what happened – he’d made sure enough of that.

*

He had never dreaded going home so much, and it took everything he had to hide it. Nott didn’t know what he was up to, but he didn’t ask him what was wrong. His father wasn’t in Azkaban, or out of favour with the Dark Lord, but he knew the shape of Draco’s situation, if not the details. Some of the other Slytherins were staying at Hogwarts this year. More students than ever were, for reasons of safety. Potter would be staying at Hogwarts for Christmas. She, at least, had a choice.  

His mother met him at the platform, looking as composed as always, but he thought she seemed more tired, more weary as she bestowed a perfunctory kiss on his cheek – she was never particularly affectionate in public – and they apparated home.

A tinge of gloom, or darkness seemed to hover about the place. Bellatrix greeted them in the hallway, pulling him close in an unwelcome embrace.

“Good to have you back, Draco. The Dark Lord is waiting,” she said, nodding to the staircase. He was careful to keep his face blank. He hated to leave his mother behind. He was glad she wasn’t coming with.

The many steps leading to the wing of the manor that the Dark Lord had commanded as his own had never seemed so long. A knock on the door and then he was inside, and lone with the most fearsome wizard in Britain. The wizard he was failing.

“Draco,” the Dark Lord said, as the door closed behind him “tell me, what progress have you made.” Hardly any, he thought, bowing before him, and he opened his mouth to tell him about his poisoned mead.

“My Lord,” he began, his eyes fixed on the hems of his robe.

“Look at me Draco,” the Dark Lord said. Terrified, trying to keep his mind in order, he slowly raised his chin to meet those awful red eyes and-

\- he was helpless to hide his thoughts about her and the flinched as the Dark Lord lingered on them, flashed of her stretching in class, small breasts pushed against her white shirt watching her from across the Great Hall and noticing her legs, his jealousy at seeing her with that blond idiot Longbottom and her friendly smile, linking their arms affectionately, her face flushed with anger in Defence as she dispelled Snape’s curse, the realization that she was powerful, and countless moments trying not to look too long at her hair, her lips, bitten in concentration, how pale and lovely she looked in the dim lighting how much he hated her how much he envied her how much he wanted her wanted the girl who everyone else admired so much and he was disgusted with himself for it and he wanted her recognition and respect and-

Lord Voldemort laughed as Draco stumbled, straightening again, sure he was about to be tortured. He was terrified, could hardly bring himself to look at him, the terrible and powerful wizard who had just witnessed his most shameful thoughts about the girl he was sworn enemies with and who the Dark Lord would surely kill.

“She has grown rather pretty, hasn’t she?” the wizard said, and when Draco could bring himself to look at his Lord he looked more amused than anything else. He had recently changed faces, and looked almost nothing like the snake-like creature he had been when Draco had first encountered him, appearing instead as a handsome young man in his thirties, with aristocratic good looks and dark hair. His eyes were as terrible as ever – red as blood and not nearly as vital.

“Now, Draco, it’s nothing to worry about, is it?” Lord Voldemort said, his handsome face pulling into a parody of a smile, “better wizards than you have lusted for pretty witches before, and they’ve all done their duty in the end you know.”

He flinched, and nodded.

“Still, there is something about that family,” Lord Voldemort mused, raising his wand and looking at it pensively, “her mother was trouble as well, though I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.” Draco wasn’t sure what he was talking about, and so he made no answer, keeping his eyes fixed on the carpet before his Lord. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or worried that his Aunt wasn’t there with them. He knew little enough about Potter’s mother aside from the two most important facts – she had been a muggleborn, and she had died.

“They were both troublesome,” Lord Voldemort continued, sounding a little regretful, “her father and mother were talented, powerful, and well-regarded, and it was a shame that they had to die – I do regret the spillage of magical blood. But they chose the wrong side, as has their daughter.”

Draco thought that she had probably never had a choice. Nor had he, really. She had been marked for death since the Dark Lord had failed to kill her as a child, and it was only a matter of time before he finished the job. 

“And children do so often make the same unfortunate choices as their parents.”

At this point, Draco was unsure of his Lord was merely disregarding him, or just toying with him, as a kneezle might do with a gnome that it knew full well it had caught, but wanted to enjoy a little longer.

“A pity,” Lord Voldemort added, before turning to regard Draco again with the full weight of that terrible red gaze. Draco did not detect a hint of pity in his voice.

*

Back at school he discovered he had failed, only succeeding in poisoning Slughorn, and not even killing the man. He began to grow increasingly desperate. His grades were slipping. He was hardly sleeping, as he worked to repair the vanishing cabinet, as his plot with a cursed necklace from Borgin and Burkes failed, as it become ever more apparent to him that he would certainly be failing his family.

He spent long hours in the Room of Requirement. Sometimes, he went to the abandoned girls’ bathroom where he found himself confiding in a pathetic ghost of all things – but surely she wasn’t more pathetic than he was anymore. Potter had been here once – Potter had brewed an illegal potion with Granger and Weasley and Potter had entered the Chamber of Secrets and defeated the monster that had been petrifying mudbloods. Myrtle didn’t like her either. He wondered if she was aware enough to know that had she been alive, she would have been exactly the kind of girl he’d have bullied or ignored in favour of chasing pretty, talented witches like Potter.

And then Violet Potter found him in the bathroom and his nightmare had become complete. Terrible and grave, dark and merciless he had duelled her and he had lost and then he lay on the floor, bleeding, and dying. Her gaze was horrified, her face starker than ever, as though it were she who was rapidly becoming bloodless and as his vision blurred he thought for a moment how when they duelled her eyes almost reminded him of something bright, of something terrible.

*

He survived. Violet Potter earned herself detention with Professor Snape for the rest of the year but she hardly seemed to mind. Paradoxically, he found himself more obsessed with her than ever, wondering at her ability to use such a dark curse and cast it so quickly, and silently. She was not the paragon of virtue everyone liked to believe her to be, that much was clear.

He found it strangely satisfying, and focused on that thought when Snape summoned him to his office as soon as he was released from the Hospital Wing. There was no favouritism from him anymore, Draco thought bitterly. And no trust between them either. They were both jockeying for favour with the Dark Lord and Draco knew it was every wizard for himself.

Snape had reprimanded him harshly, and though his Occlumency was strong enough to protect his mind from his godfather and professor, he could not help but feel that Snape saw more than he would have liked, or knew something more than he should about Draco and Potter.

“You were foolish to confront her,” the other man hissed, pacing up and down his office, not bothering to look at Draco. “I don’t know what has been possessing you this year but-” And here Draco flinched, involuntarily and Snape whirled to a halt, scrutinizing him but apparently failing to come to some conclusion. “-but Violet Potter is not to be touched, as the Dark Lord has made very clear.”

“She followed me!” he protested, and regretted, as Snape whirled on him, his dark eyes flashing.

“It hardly matters,” Snape replied.

“Well, she won,” he said, bitterly. She had been quicker on the draw than he had and talented at dodging even those curses he knew could penetrate a _protego_.

“Such trivialities will hardly matter to the Dark Lord,” Snape said, as Draco burned at being dismissed as a triviality. He thought he would never grow use to humiliation, he would never stop hating himself ad everyone else.

*

He finally fixes the cabinet, triumphant and gleeful. He hardly cares to think about the consequences but that months of frustration, of inadequacy, of work have paid off and he’ll live, and his mother will live. 

He is terrified up in the tower, the soft, wise lines of the headmaster’s face, calm and assured even in the face of death burning into his consciousness. Dumbledore is right about him and he hates it – and hates most of all how little Dumbledore seems to hate him. He fails to kill him –  moments later, Potter fails to kill Draco, only tossing a few curses his way before focusing with a terrifying intensity on Professor Snape.

He sees her duelling Snape as he flees, feels his heart in his throat as they toss deadly spells at each other before Bellatrix pulls him away and they move to the boarders of the school, where they will be able to apparate. She says something to him that makes him incandescently angry, yelling something about calling him a coward and something about the curl of her lip stays with him even as he’s twisted into knots and stumbling at the gates of his family’s manor. She threw more Unforgivables at Snape than he’s cast in his life.

*

Draco is welcomed home by the Dark Lord, triumphant that his great enemy, Albus Dumbledore is dead at last. Something about the human face he wears now makes him more real, more sickening in his satisfaction as he greats the Death Eaters after their mission. He hardly seems to care that Draco failed to kill Dumbledore in the end. He hardly seems to care that it was Snape who took care of it. Gibbon’s death is treated as an afterthought.

He twirls his yew wand casually (his mother had always put more stock in wandlore than was fashionable – Draco thinks she has been proven right) as he congratulates them, speaking briefly about the Ministry, how it will be the next to fall. Draco can’t imagine he’s wrong. He can’t bring himself to mourn its eventual fate much. Hogwarts has always been something of a home, but if he can invite a bunch of maddened killers among his schoolmates he supposes the kind secretaries who smiled at him when he occasionally accompanied his father will not merit much thought when the time comes.

Draco focuses on the Dark Lord’s wand, wondering why it seems soothing – that wand has killed more wizards than he would care to know. That wand killed Violet Potter’s parents, and will kill Violet Potter –

 - who also twirls her wand and occasionally smiles in the same way, one corner of her mouth raised eyes slightly lidded and something hard and fast flashing behind, satisfied in her victory (Quidditch, duelling, not death) but all the same -

He feels sick. He must be paler, suddenly, or something must show on his face or perhaps it’s just paranoia again but everyone besides Draco is being dismissed, everyone besides Draco and Snape.

Perhaps he is going to die, and that is why the Dark Lord hardly seemed to care earlier than it was Snape who cursed Dumbledore, just saving it up, not anger but something else, some motivating excuse to kill another wizard, even one like Draco who is surely under his thumb and has some of the purest blood in England. (He lists them, the dead ones, the Prewetts, MacKinnons, Bones’, Longbottoms, even a Black, some Burke witch who had married a mudblood, the Potters…)

Fitting he supposes, it will be here in his ancestral home only there are no more Malfoys and perhaps there never will be but instead the Dark Lord asks about Violet Potter and Draco half-listens to Snape’s wooden recitation of her part in the fight.

“And how was her duelling?” the Dark Lord asks, turning a little to look out one of the spectacular picture windows.

“Reckless, sloppy,” Snape says, his voice curt, his head inclined. She must have cast a dozen Killing Curses, Draco thinks, he hadn’t been counting but there had been a lot of green, they were costly spells, draining, and she could toss them about (supposing she hadn’t collapsed in exhaustion after they all left, supposing he wasn’t imagining things).

The witch in the glass was still beneath the Dark Lord’s gaze, some ancestor or another. They moved, those glass figures of old Malfoys, but they weren’t like the wizarding paintings. Her hair was dark, her lead-lined features indistinguishable in their abstraction.

“Was she really?” He almost sounded disappointed.

Would Violet Potter ever grace a window, or a painting, or would she be erased entirely, even blotted out of history books? Draco didn’t spend very much time thinking about the future as a whole, but distracted himself with little things. Would the Dark Lord move out after their victory? Would his father be mad after Azkaban, or sane? Would his mother laugh again? Would their cousins from Paris come for a visit after things settled down, and if so, what would they even have to say to each other?

“Draco,” the Dark Lord says, his voice soft, insidious, “I asked you what you thought.”

His stammered apology is waved away with a pale, spidery hand. He picks his words carefully to answer a question he never heard

“She was angry,” he says, pausing, “she uses curses that we’re not taught in class, for the most part.” He hopes the observation is adequate. There is a flicker of annoyance in the Dark Lord’s expression.

“I have received better detail from the garbled recitations of half-breeds under the cruciatus,” Voldemort says, turning further away from them, raising his wand minutely. His whole hand is illuminated by the light from a red pane of glass, part of some heraldic crest or coloured robes.

Snape bows his head, “my apologies, My Lord – ”

He is cut off before he can continue.

“I would hope at least one of you was watching her,” they are told, and then the Dark Lord turns to examine them with a command. “Look at me,” and feeling sick Draco does. It’s those eyes that remain inhuman (and his pallor, and his smile) red as the flash of the dull burgundy bludgeoning curse she clips him with as he is tugged along, something viciously, inhumanly angry in her gaze what she shouts (curses, or vows of revenge) he can’t make out, dark hair slightly matted in its plait what a pale face what green eyes and the mouth twisted he is running and just wants to get away from the tower she is not focused on him anyway but on Snape, trying to kill him with lashings of angry green curses and other ones, his ankle rolls he rights himself rushing into the woods he is

back to himself slightly horrified but Snape is now looking at their master composed but his mouth is even thinner if possible as the Dark Lord searches his mind, Draco supposes, taking the seconds to pull himself into some kind of order before the Dark Lord turns away again with a slight sneer.

 “You would do well to forget about your little infatuation, Draco” the Dark Lord says, something mocking in the twist of his smile – which grew wider as Draco flinched. He was peripherally aware that the intensity of Snape’s gaze.

“Even if she weren’t a blood traitor” (she’s not even a pureblood he thinks – Malfoy’s have married halfbloods, he thinks) “she would be unsuitable. But Severus could tell you all about that, couldn’t he?”

His eyes widen infinitesimally in shock – he is unsure who the Dark Lord is referring to but Snape is not – his face is blank and he is almost impassive but all the same there is something brewing beneath the surface there and Draco can admit to himself it seems awful.

“She’d still never look at the likes of you.” Something is missing, besides the ground beneath his feet and his father and his dignity. He does not care to find it.

They are dismissed. Snape is suddenly seething and furious Draco will not ask him why or ask him anything or interact at all with him, he will make his way to his mother’s room. He will not react to the hateful glance thrown his way by the wizard next to him, a hate he is sure has nothing to do with him and something to do with Violet Potter’s unsuitability. He will erase the afterimage of a witch with dark hair and green, green eyes, and a murderous countenance that the Dark Lord lingered over and two wands twirling and the paleness of two faces, the darkness of two heads, the cruel satisfaction in the visage of one of them, with lidded eyes and a thoughtful gaze as he froze a glass window, and smiled.  He will not wonder if the pale pink glass spouted a more detailed profile, looking back over its crimson-clad shoulder, or if the half-moon eyes became pupiled and white and green or even if its red mouth thinned out into distinguishability and smiled back, cruel, crazed, and remote as the moon, as his hope.

 _Pax_ , peace, rest, he thinks. He will find his mother let her see him alive and then perhaps he will sleep. Perhaps he will not be sick.

**Author's Note:**

> Fucking DONE with finals and also school so I'm writing and reading fanfic again to reward my bad self, probably focusing on the various female Harry WIPs I'm kicking around because I am trash and there are some really excellent Tom Riddle/femHarry works in that tag that are really too much for me to resist. Anyone else noticed an uptick in the past few years of those kinds of excellent and slightly problématique stories?


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